Tuesday, April 01, 2008

Overstimulation = No-stimulationWhen it comes to creatività, overstimulation is probably more dangerous and negative than its opposite: no stimulation at all. Actually in our late society, overstimulation is entitled to produce even worse results than lack of creativity in human beings. So let’s treat it “in general”, pretending (I’m convinced of this, but I don’t want to impose it) that developing creatività would also correspond to developing awareness, independence of thought and decision-making capacity. This would mean that exploring this realm would eventually help to understand one’s self and everything else around, which is a lot more interesting than art or creativity in themselves.

Pretentious…..but possible….so maybe not so pretentious.

I’ve seen teen-ager art students going through surprising transformations (actually just got a bit more in tune with their lives) only because they found a way to paint, or to simply say something through creative solutions. When it comes to keeping our creative potential awake in a global connected world, the task becomes extremely difficult. On the contrary of what it may seem, excess of information, and especially aggressive advertising, definitely shuts the mind and the senses out, overcharging them until they reach an unstable critical mass. Also in terms of maturity, development and awareness an overload of information slows down all of them. The enormous effort necessary to filtrate, select and digest every input, in order to be able to really feed on it, is exhausting and unuseful. The possibility of having access to information is now granted and unlimited….

So, first of all, why being sucked up by contemporary obsession with speed and round-the-clock activity ? Whenever information is really needed, then let’s use technology and get it, otherwise, why doing something all the time? Why give in to the urge of “doing something” ? Personally, creatively and even politically speaking, nothing would be more appropriate right now. Stop, stand back, take enough distance.

This is not about “slow living” or any other pseudo-ecological-healthy-life-style ideological package…..absolutely not. This is about taking some distance from life-rhythm, to be able to observe calmly what’s happening around. Today this will imply an immediate growing anxiety to be alone, cut off from the world, left out. If it’s possible to resist to it, a new possibility may appear. Focusing on small details, listening to the hidden currents underneath every movement or in reaction to minimum environmental modification, alone, in a place where naturally it feels comfortable just being there and listen.

A surprising simple stimulation of creativity may be to try and reach enough detachment from our daily life to be able to observe it, note it down with few scribbled lines and see how we interact with our closet environment. Describing our automatic gestures, seeing them from outside, from above,..will be the first step. Once acknowledged, this simple picture, it might be interesting to choose some of these gestures or habits and explore its complexity, its meaning and its effect on our body and on our mind day by day. The range of discoveries during this process is wide and coloured, and generally vivid and intense. A growing perception of what is true and spontaneous in a gesture, compared to what instead is fake, cultural or habit induced, represents the very first enlightenment on the path of a creative life.